News of the day
1. Mistral AI launches Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2, open models for coding agents, with Devstral 2 achieving SOTA performance and cost-efficiency → Read more
2. Anthropic donates MCP protocol to Linux Foundation, forming the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) with key AI players joining. → Read more
3. AI voice leader ElevenLabs valued at $6.6B, pivoting to conversational AI agents and exploring music generation. → Read more
4. Couchbase AI Services platform is now available, unifying data and models for agentic AI with NVIDIA integration. → Read more
Our take
Hi Dotikers!
Mistral is ending the year strong with the release of two new models specifically designed for AI-assisted development: Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2.
The flagship model, Devstral 2, delivers impressive benchmark results and claims to be up to 7x more cost-effective than Claude Sonnet on real-world development tasks. A tempting proposition for tech teams looking to automate part of their coding workflow.
The lighter version, Devstral Small 2, is smaller and therefore easier to run locally or with limited resources.
These models come alongside the launch of Mistral Vibe, a command-line tool that lets you use AI as a development assistant directly from your terminal. This is clearly "vibe coding" territory, where developers have a conversation with AI to generate, modify and fix code.
Things get tricky when it comes to licensing. The smaller version is completely free to use, even for commercial projects. The larger model, however, prohibits use by companies exceeding 20 million dollars in monthly revenue.
This "open source with an asterisk" approach is becoming increasingly common. It allows vendors to appeal to the developer community while protecting their enterprise market.
In short, Mistral continues to make moves in the coding tools space with promising performance and aggressive pricing. Worth considering for SMBs and independent developers.
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